What do you think about when you think of "coding"? Does it confuse or scare you? It scares me! As a liberal arts student, I feel perfectly fine providing content to somebody else who knows how to put it online. However, the more that I delve into the world of coding, the more I realize that liberal arts students and coders are not so different. In a job market that is increasingly seeking people with experience in technology, us liberal arts students have many huge incentives to learn how to code.
My interest in coding actually started only recently. Before signing on to help with this blog, I was involved in another project that had the goal of learning to code by building a website. Together with some other students, my good friend Patrick (who is a fellow liberal arts student and coding enthusiast) was helping us learn the basic of code. At first, it was scary. All that I saw were long strings of unfamiliar equations, words, and punctuation that showed on my screen in different colors and somehow made it possible for words to appear on the internet. Code was everywhere, with long strands of code forming the framework for every tweet, Facebook Marketplace post, and CNN news story. The whole world of coding felt, at first glance, inaccessible to people like me who enjoy reading and writing but aren’t too concerned with how those things can be done digitally. For example, I would see an image like the one below, for example, and get totally confused. What do the different colors mean? What do words like “debug” or “job_dir” mean? For a person invested in words and language crafting, coding language suddenly makes me feel totally incapable.
As it turns out, coding is a very valuable skill in the job market. In 2015, Burning Glass discovered that over seven million job openings valued coding experience. Supporting this finding, Glassdoor listed in 2016 that, out of the top 25 growing jobs in the market, tech-related positions make up eight. Whether an employer is looking for people with coding experience or not, learning to perform even basic coding tasks can give you a leg up when helping with future digital projects. Things like website design, feedback form generation, and are all meaningful applications of coding knowledge that are totally accessible to liberal arts students. You don’t need to be a computer programmer to learn this stuff at all. Just a computer, a bit of time, and a bit of motivation are all you need to get started! I’ve only just started learning, but I already see the applicability of coding to the liberal arts in at least two ways:
I want to try my hand at combining my liberal arts skillset with my coding skillset. To do that, I'm going to continue the project that I mentioned at the beginning of this post. With help from my friend Patrick, I'm going to try to build a website with code that shows my love for the liberal arts and newfound appreciation for coding language. My goal for the website is to create a repository of favorite poems. This repository will feature a button that will show to the user a single random poem from within the repository. While the scope of this project won't allow me to do much more than create a random poem generator, I hope that this coding project will lay a good base for something bigger and more interactive in the future.
Even if you don't get super involved with coding, I recommend checking out some of the resources below to get some basic literacy about the different coding languages. I really enjoy freecodecamp.com, they make learning coding really fun! Additionally, if you'd like to contribute some of your favorite poems to my website project, fill out this form. Let's build it together!
freeCodeCamp
Visual Studio Code
CSS/HTML/JS Cheat Sheet
My interest in coding actually started only recently. Before signing on to help with this blog, I was involved in another project that had the goal of learning to code by building a website. Together with some other students, my good friend Patrick (who is a fellow liberal arts student and coding enthusiast) was helping us learn the basic of code. At first, it was scary. All that I saw were long strings of unfamiliar equations, words, and punctuation that showed on my screen in different colors and somehow made it possible for words to appear on the internet. Code was everywhere, with long strands of code forming the framework for every tweet, Facebook Marketplace post, and CNN news story. The whole world of coding felt, at first glance, inaccessible to people like me who enjoy reading and writing but aren’t too concerned with how those things can be done digitally. For example, I would see an image like the one below, for example, and get totally confused. What do the different colors mean? What do words like “debug” or “job_dir” mean? For a person invested in words and language crafting, coding language suddenly makes me feel totally incapable.
As it turns out, coding is a very valuable skill in the job market. In 2015, Burning Glass discovered that over seven million job openings valued coding experience. Supporting this finding, Glassdoor listed in 2016 that, out of the top 25 growing jobs in the market, tech-related positions make up eight. Whether an employer is looking for people with coding experience or not, learning to perform even basic coding tasks can give you a leg up when helping with future digital projects. Things like website design, feedback form generation, and are all meaningful applications of coding knowledge that are totally accessible to liberal arts students. You don’t need to be a computer programmer to learn this stuff at all. Just a computer, a bit of time, and a bit of motivation are all you need to get started! I’ve only just started learning, but I already see the applicability of coding to the liberal arts in at least two ways:
- Coding is more similar to the Liberal Arts skill set than I had thought. One thing that scared me about coding, initially, was that it seemed too closely associated with mathematics and computer science, which are two phrases that totally terrify me. I haven’t done any math in at least three years and wasn’t sure if I was ready to start doing it again. However, as I began learning about the different coding elements and how they work together to format web pages, I realized that coding is more similar to learning a language or writing a paper than, say, solving math problems. Coding fluency requires a similar level of practice, trial and error, and interacting with others that goes hand in hand with the skills that I’ve learned as an English major. Perhaps, the things we’ve learned make us liberal arts people some of the most well-equipped people to meet the increase in demand for coding. As people who are especially concerned with the marketability of our skillset, coding is an excellent way to fix those concerns.
- Coding is great referencing practice. An understanding of concepts like intertextuality, metaphor, referencing, and sourcing is a key skill required of any liberal arts student. As it turns out, within the world of coding, knowing how to reference different parts of your code, integrate data from outside sources, and use unique identifiers for your many different links are all key skills. Though this isn’t necessarily the same type of resourcing involved in writing a paper, while coding I felt something similar to when I search for peer-reviewed literary criticism and other resources to cite in my papers. For example, when Patrick taught me about CSS (which is to my understanding code that determines styles on a page such as text font, color, and size), he showed me websites that had code already written for the styles I wanted. An advantage of coding that doesn’t necessarily exist in liberal arts? You’ll know if you’ve done it right because the code will work perfectly with zero errors! If only we could do the same with our academic papers...
I want to try my hand at combining my liberal arts skillset with my coding skillset. To do that, I'm going to continue the project that I mentioned at the beginning of this post. With help from my friend Patrick, I'm going to try to build a website with code that shows my love for the liberal arts and newfound appreciation for coding language. My goal for the website is to create a repository of favorite poems. This repository will feature a button that will show to the user a single random poem from within the repository. While the scope of this project won't allow me to do much more than create a random poem generator, I hope that this coding project will lay a good base for something bigger and more interactive in the future.
Even if you don't get super involved with coding, I recommend checking out some of the resources below to get some basic literacy about the different coding languages. I really enjoy freecodecamp.com, they make learning coding really fun! Additionally, if you'd like to contribute some of your favorite poems to my website project, fill out this form. Let's build it together!
freeCodeCamp
Visual Studio Code
CSS/HTML/JS Cheat Sheet
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